In this episode, we dive into setting up the all-important appointments system. We start by designing our Appointment model and the corresponding database migration, where we create all the fields we'll need: things like a unique UUID, associated service and employee, start and end date-times, canceled status, and basic customer info (name and email). There’s flexibility here, so you can add more customer details if you like!
You'll see how we wire up these fields in our migration, and discuss why using UUIDs is handy (especially if you're referencing the appointment from the client side). After getting the essentials down, we run our migration to update the database, then jump into the factory for generating fake appointments—helpful for testing later.
We also make sure the Appointment model properly casts our date fields (so we can easily work with them as date objects) and add the right relationships, so an appointment knows what service was booked and which employee it's for. We add a little magic with Eloquent events to generate a UUID for each appointment as it's created—no need to do this manually every time.
To finish off, we hop over to the Employee model and add a relationship so we can quickly get all appointments for any employee—super useful when we’re calculating their availability. By the end of the episode, our database and models are all set up and ready for building out the real booking logic in the next lesson, where we’ll look at how to handle available date periods. Progress!